The arrangements by which social practices are sustained and structured rely in principle on certain treasured values and beliefs. Such arrangements, though, may occasionally fail to do their job correctly, and this happens when some people turn reflective and their perception of those practices, as well as of the underlying values and beliefs, is no longer constrained by the assuring course of social conventions. Traditions and rituals have the power “to weave a cocoon of moral assurance around us,” protecting us from unpleasant reminders of the costs and disadvantages of the present arrangements.Footnote ¹ The sense of moral assurance holds until some people start talking about those traditions and rituals and their talk carries undertones of questioning and doubts. They may seek to upset routines, to challenge their own ways of looking at things, or to provide a way out from a particular mental constraint.Footnote ²

Over the last forty years, some cherished moral principles have been replaced by what Daniel Dennett has called “free floating rationales,” so that a number of aspects of life in contemporary Western societies, such as children's obedience to parents, romantic love, marriage, and religious beliefs, have been exposed to the corrosive action of narratives aimed at deflating their status as values. Such narratives drew heavily on Marxism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, and once exposed to these novel intellectual orientations, people became suspicious about the mental and social structures which supposedly caused them to believe in certain values. Philip Kitcher has drawn a clear philosophical case from this assumption, arguing that “the epistemic status of a belief state depends on the etiology of the state.”Footnote ³ Exposing the etiology and sources of beliefs, attitudes, and norms may help people to establish or restore the conditions of intelligibility of their moral insight.

The objective of that particular philosophical attitude that we call genealogy is, in general, to examine the process whereby a “belief state” has come about and see whether, and at which stage of the process itself, some mental attitudes, biases, and delusions have made the progress to the present state difficult. A genealogical scrutiny turns out to be particularly effective when it comes to facts, or items, or states whose nature is fundamentally explicable in terms of their history. Values are certainly a case in point, as they prove typically amenable to an explanation by means of narratives aimed at revealing how they have come about.Footnote ⁴

We tend to associate genealogical approaches to morality with writers such as Foucault and Nietzsche and have reason to believe that the brand of skepticism that has impregnated so many aspects of our lives, especially since the late 1960s, depends on some kind of familiarization with certain stories about the origins and functioning of some values, stories with the secret aim to deflate or lay bare those values.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, the purpose of a story guided by a genealogical aim is, in Foucault's words, “not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation.”Footnote ⁶

One fact about critical approaches to belief states in general is that the information that may reveal the biases of such states and “default presumptions” is usually presented in a story format, and people may be induced to realize that some of the values they cherish are not ontological features or perennial essences about their psychology so long as the origins and development of such values could be traced back in the past.Footnote ⁷ People realized that marriage, family, and society were less natural facts than the sites of hidden power-relationships; they worked, in other words, as control-arrangements duly supported by suitable just-so stories. The very idea that “everybody has a biography” and that this biography is, in a way, constitutive of the values and beliefs one comes to profess seems pretty obvious to us.Footnote ⁸ It is, nonetheless, a quite recent idea, which contributed to clear the realm of human psychology from those metaphysical properties that had been an obstacle to the pursuit of a scientific scrutiny of morality.

However, as I hope to show in this article, this special attitude to human values is much older than Nietzsche or Foucault. It is, rather, as old as storytelling.Footnote ⁹ Humans have been telling stories to one another not only to entertain themselves but also to caution their less-experienced fellow humans about dangers and taboos, or to inculcate some beliefs or values that the community considered critical for its own survival. Genealogy, admittedly, belongs to the broader genre of storytelling, so long as genealogical accounts or narratives have to do with the origins and development of a given state of affairs. Stories inspired by a genealogical aim can show that claims of moral viability often depend on implicit claims of historical success.Footnote ¹⁰ Such thick values as love for one's country or religion are contingent on, and sensitive to, some historical success stories.Footnote ¹¹ But claims of historical success are often based on false or biased assumptions about how some arrangements have come about, and often a minority report can recount the process by disclosing genealogically some unlikable features that the standard story has eclipsed.

Genealogy as a literary genre reached an astonishing degree of precision in the work of a writer whose vast influence on and critical standing in the Western canon are hardly disputable: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Genealogical, and overtly so, is the general outlook of his history of the origins of the gods, the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, but also genealogical is the secret aim of the stories that make up his literary masterwork, the Decameron.Footnote ¹²

Political philosophy has never attempted to find here a coherent set of doctrines, or theories, or mere clues. The Decameron, though, contains references to all the major elements of Western political thought: for example, there is a state-of-nature story, a utopian or Arcadian element as a metaphor of buon governo, an attempt to “identify conflicts in gender relation,”Footnote ¹³ and an embryonic theory of religious tolerance. The aim of this article is to expand on the politics of storytelling that structures Boccaccio's understanding of human mores and sociability. Boccaccio had interesting and profound ideas about issues concerning people's social attitudes: he had his own idiosyncratic way to examine and critique these attitudes, and this way consisted in telling stories. He wrote not just stories, but stories structured in a characteristic way, that is, stories with a distinctive genealogical imprint.

In the following, I shall focus especially on the introduction to the First Day, and on one story in particular, the famous novella of Saint Ciappelletto, the first story of the First Day. I shall stress the genealogical thrust of Boccaccio's method of inquiry into the nature of values.Footnote ¹⁴ If the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri was basically intended as a description of, as well as an investigation into, the genealogy of the gods of the Gentiles (seu genealogias describere aut perquirere Footnote ¹⁵), the Decameron brings the same method to bear on the nature of values, on the assumption that values, in a world emptied of the gods, retain a similar normative and aggregating function.Footnote ¹⁶ In the first two sections of the article, I shall identify the two basic ingredients of every genealogical survey, namely, a “direction of fit,” indicating the supposedly proper direction that the story subjected to genealogical scrutiny ought to have taken, and a terminus a quo, the historical or conceptual beginning that needs to be tracked in order to determine when the events departed from the direction of fit.Footnote ¹⁷ Section 3 will explore the genealogical implications of the tale of Saint Ciappelletto. Section 4 stresses how the genealogical structure of the Decameron serves the implicit purpose of “naturalizing humanity.” Section 5 examines the genealogical subtext of both Decameron and Genealogie. It shows that genealogy here is aimed at exposing—in Foucault's words—the “solemnities of the origin.”Footnote ¹⁸ Genealogy unveils the politics of the origin underlying the success story, the solemn story that supports the moral outlook of a polity in which power relationships strive to conceal their real rationales.

Pampinea's Test

It has been argued “that one important current of work in contemporary moral and political philosophy has been concerned with reflecting on our values, and our ways of thinking about them, at least in part through recourse to historical accounts of the sources and routes through which our inheritance has been composed.”Footnote ¹⁹ Storytelling, especially when it is aimed at inquiring reflectively about the origins of values, often leads to a re-evaluation or reappraisal of those values. A supposedly missing piece of information about the origins of our values is finally available through the story we are told, and we are thus in a position to appraise the value at stake.

This element of “appraisal” has been stressed by authors as diverse as Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner. According to Foucault, genealogy aims to identify the “false appraisals … that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us.”Footnote ²⁰ Skinner has claimed that by examining and reflecting on the historical record, “we can hope to stand back from, and perhaps even to reappraise, some of our current assumptions and beliefs.”Footnote ²¹ The targets of Boccaccio's exercises in reappraisal are basically the habits and arrangements that lie behind the public life of Florence in the mid-fourteenth century. Boccaccio tells the story of ten storytellers, who gather together under quite extreme circumstances in a place near Florence and spend the time by telling stories, “an activity that may afford some amusement both to the narrator and to the company at large” (D, 23). But it is not only to amuse themselves that the members of the group, or brigata, gather together in the hills of Fiesole. Boccaccio creates a sort of perspective trick by which he brings about the same impression of distance and detachment described by Skinner. In the opening lines of the Decameron, Boccaccio recalls “the painful memory [dolorosa ricordazione] of the deadly havoc wrought by the recent plague, which brought so much heartache and misery to those who witnessed or had experience of it” (D, 5). In order to escape the plague, the storytellers are imagined to retreat from the city of Florence. In order to speak the truth about the “default presumptions” underlying the arrangements and habits of other people (including their fellow citizens), the storytellers are placed far away from the locus in which, apparently, those arrangements and habits have dramatically departed from the direction of fit.

The plague that befell Florence in 1348 is historical, but Boccaccio picks up on its extraordinary and inexplicable nature to allow himself, as a meta-narrator, a number of moves that would not otherwise be permitted by the literary and moral deontology of the time.Footnote ²² The Decameron tells the story of ten people, seven women and three men, who resolve to “escape from the sadness, the suffering and the anguish continuously to be found in our city since this plague first descended upon it” (D, 795). The brigata retreats to a villa in the countryside near Fiesole and resolves to settle there until the epidemic recedes. The villa is yet another epiphany of the ancient topos of the locus amoenus, a place in which the pastoral tale of a love unaffected by envy and enmity can freely unfurl. The choice of numbers is also instructive: the seven ladies “all possess in full measure the quality of wisdom”Footnote ²³ and each represents, arguably, one of the seven virtues, whereas the three men—Panfilo, Filostrato, and Dioneo—represent, respectively, reason, anger, and lust.Footnote ²⁴

Of the seven ladies, Pampinea is the one in charge of setting the general agenda, who suggests that the hotter hours of the day be spent “not in playing games … but in telling stories” (D, 23). But she is also the one who gives the reader, in the introduction to the First Day, an important piece of information about the group's chief moral attitude: “We could go and stay together on one of our various country estates, shunning at all costs the lewd practices of our fellow-citizens and feasting and merrymaking as best we may without in any way overstepping the bounds of what is reasonable [senza trapassare in alcuno atto il segno della ragione]” (D, 16). This statement sets a benchmark, or segno, for the general conduct of the ten members of the brigata; “Pampinea's test” is a minimal rule of thumb by which each member is expected to get his or her bearings in a space in which the basic social arrangements are all gone.Footnote ²⁵ The test is valid within the boundaries of the estate in which the group will spend this period of retreat, but it is also valid as a normative criterion for choosing and structuring the content of the stories that the ten members will be hearing from each other.Footnote ²⁶

In the Decameron the actions and exploits of the characters of the stories are not judged on the basis of some sort of supernatural code or measure of evaluation.Footnote ²⁷ Actions are praised or scorned or despised in light of a rational criterion, and the moral viability of an action is made to depend on its ability to fit to a criterion defined by the sheer bounds of the reasonable. Actions are praised or criticized according to rational criteria, and the moral goodness of an action is seen to depend upon whether it conforms to a criterion that falls within the purview of what is believed to be reasonable.Footnote ²⁸ Reasonable, for humans, is the fact of living together, and Boccaccio consistently assumes that humans are sociable beings.Footnote ²⁹ Boccaccio spurns the “single and very inhuman precaution” taken by the people of Florence “to avoid or run away from the sick and their belongings” (D, 7). But he also makes clear that the brigata's retreat is not motivated by the same inhuman purpose. Pampinea maintains that “unless I am mistaken we shall not be abandoning anyone by going away from here; on the contrary, we may fairly claim that we are the ones who have been abandoned, for our kinsfolk are either dead or fled, and have left us to fend for ourselves in the midst of all this affliction, as though disowning us completely” (D, 16).

The Decameron offers a powerful exploration of various modalities of living together and consistently applies the criterion of the reasonable to modes of sociality that apparently fall short of the test set by Pampinea. But, again, the application of the test presupposes the creation of an external viewpoint from which one can observe how people of various backgrounds and beliefs react when their pride or social standing within their group is diminished or challenged. Boccaccio works out a rhetorical technique that enables him to lay bare the default presumptions of the time by exposing the stakes hidden in some dominant social practices and discourses. A recurrent theme of the stories is the disclosure and final exposure of the real motives of those who use their social status to rationalize their sheer will to power. The subjection of some people by others is traced back to a pure craving for domination, over and beyond the bounds of what is reasonable. Failure to pass Pampinea's test amounts to a clear condemnation of extant habits and practices.

Boccaccio traces a direction of fit from a situation in which no value can be detected and used to pursue a minimum degree of sociality, to a perfect condition of cooperation and civility.Footnote ³⁰ He seems to endorse the assumption that people usually deviate from the direction of fit because they fail to know what causes them to live and act according to some socially established values. The failure here occurs at the level of knowledge and self-reflection. People fail to turn reflective; they fail to stand for beliefs worthy of their rational commitments. They, in other words, fail to let themselves be guided by the force of reason. It is reason that prompts them in the direction of the eventual accomplishment of their (rational) nature, to a realm of flawless sociality in which all available values will ultimately fit the simple dictates of reason.

The little Arcadia that Boccaccio installs in the hills surrounding Florence is a sort of ideal society in which people know what causes them to stand for a belief. The ten storytellers, disenfranchised from the delusions and false beliefs of their fellow humans, set out to expose the etiology of some dominant values and belief states by reminding the reader that human sociality has secret underpinnings that need to be made explicit.Footnote ³¹

A State-of-Nature Story

The kind of detachment effect described above is made possible by an exceptional condition: the plague. Boccaccio seems aware that the only way to legislate Pampinea's test is by envisioning some kind of extreme predicament that makes the test viable. The test itself is not applicable to a normal situation, one in which the present social and normative arrangements, mostly dependent on tradition and supernatural sources of validity, are not suspended or revoked. An exceptional freedom is granted to the ten storytellers in virtue of the plague. The plague, therefore, is critical to the experiment, insofar as it creates the condition of suspension of all arrangements underpinning a structured social life in the city of Florence.

The theme of the plague has attracted a fair amount of attention from scholars, and it has been argued that the “description of the plague is meant primarily as the background, ‘an ironical and contrapunctual beat,’ to the chaste and honorable behaviour of the ten Florentine narrators.” Marilyn Migiel stressed the “breakdown of cognitive, emotional, moral, sexual boundaries,” and showed how people during the plague “are given to displays of moral and sexual excess.”Footnote ³² Jessica Levenstein put forward a more psychological (or even “anti-Oedipal”Footnote ³³) reading of the plague, according to which the devastation wrought by the epidemic is a viable metaphor for the present social and political failure to control and repress desire: what the ten members of the brigata “flee is inside them and cannot be contained” and “bolted doors and locked windows cannot block the path of desire.”Footnote ³⁴

Some scholars have minimized the role of the description of the plague in the Decameron. They agree that the theme of the plague is somehow instrumental to the rhetorical intent of dramatizing the flight from the city and establishing a contrast with the well-ordered structure of the group of storytellers. In Alberto Tenenti's words, the choice is due most probably “to the intent to make more noticeable a contrast that the reader should not fail to perceive.”Footnote ³⁵ Tenenti adds that in describing the collapse of the arrangements and boundaries of civil association, Boccaccio “does not talk about a return to the state of nature, or to barbarism.”Footnote ³⁶ However, the description of the plague does closely resemble a typical state-of-nature story, a detailed and graphic account of social beginnings.

In Western political thought state-of-nature stories have worked as general standards or thought-experiments that philosophers have recurrently used to describe the genesis of political authority, moral obligation, and private property. The underlying purpose was to explain and evaluate present social arrangements. Such writers as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau resorted to descriptions of historical beginnings in order to check and validate the routes taken from such posited beginnings. State-of-nature stories are critical to the genealogical project in general, as they help to establish a ground zero, a default situation from which all possible departures can be imagined. When it comes to the introduction to the First Day of the Decameron, scholars tend to ignore the state-of-nature hypothesis because they associate the state of nature to a fictional tale of social origins. A taxonomy of state-of-nature stories, though, would show that the underlying rationale of such stories is not to give an account of protohistorical beginnings per se. It is true that state-of-nature stories were aimed at tracing a genealogy of order and the existing social arrangements back to a situation which, supposedly, appeared to approximate the ancestral environments of human populations. But what made these stories so appealing to writers committed to testing the political viability of present arrangements was not the underlying theme of social origins but, rather, the implicit assumption of the contingency of arrangements and belief states that people are inclined to regard as immutable features of the world. State-of-nature stories served the epistemic purpose of asserting the transience and contingency of those arrangements and beliefs.Footnote ³⁷

Boccaccio pursues his genealogical enterprise by modeling his description of the plague on the general topos of the world turned upside down, of a world in which all institutions of political control are vacant and people have lost touch with supernatural sources of legitimacy. In the introduction to the First Day, Boccaccio maintains that “this scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands” (D, 8–9). It is, again, the ground zero of morality, a situation in which such normative conditions as the ones necessary to make society work no longer obtain.Footnote ³⁸

There is a striking similarity between this account of the plague and Ovid's description of the age of iron, when “men lived on plunder. Guest was not safe from host, nor father-in-law from son-in-law; even among brothers ‘twas rare to find affection. The husband longed for the death of his wife, she of her husband.”Footnote ³⁹ As it has been pointed out, “it is known that Ovid is the favored author of the young Boccaccio”;Footnote ⁴⁰ and some “anxiety of influence” seems to have propagated from Ovid to some parts of the Decameron.Footnote ⁴¹ This influence, though, has been traced to “the erotic and elegiac Ovid,” and not to the Ovid maior of the Metamorphoses.Footnote ⁴² But in the introduction to the First Day, the recourse to one of the canonical descriptions of the beginning of humankind seems instrumental to the genealogical purpose illustrated above: to indicate a terminus a quo and track the ways people fulfill or alternatively reject the dictates of reason.Footnote ⁴³ Ovid, to be sure, is the author who more frequently is appealed to in the opening pages of the Genealogie: it is indeed the Ovid maior to be invoked in order to show how Chaos—“ut Ovidius in principio maioris sui voluminis asserit” (Gen., 1.ii.21)—through the toils of Discord, generated the first living creatures.Footnote ⁴⁴

In his description of the plague, Boccaccio uses metaphors faintly reminiscent of Ovid's tale of origins for genealogical purposes: the idea of the plague as a metaphor of a situation in which life is stripped of all values was instrumental to one of the crucial underpinnings of Boccaccio's moral universe, the belief in the transience and fragility of values. Furthermore, Boccaccio does not place the ten storytellers in the state of nature, that is, in the city of Florence at the time of the plague. He is, in a way, sensitive to one of the critical features of state-of-nature stories in general, that “in the State of Nature there is no observational technology,” no way to figure out what to do in order to escape this predicament.Footnote ⁴⁵ People in the state of nature are blind as to their chances to figure their way toward a state of mutual respect and cooperation, so that, in the case described by Boccaccio, their flight from the plague is held up by their inability to make their natural drives amenable to their rational telos. The location of the storytellers out of the perimeter in which the plague rules warrants the epistemic authority of their observations. Their privileged epistemic standpoint allows them to gain a special rational insight over the actions and beliefs of the characters of their stories. They derive (epistemic) advantage from their privileged location in a place where nature resonates with the dictates of reason, far away from the corrupted nature of life under the plague. The seeming paradox is that the plague, here, is not natural, for it signals a drift toward that kind of unnatural disorderliness that comes from a corruption of the teleology of nature.Footnote ⁴⁶

Reason steers the group of storytellers away from the plague; reason instructs them about the direction of fit that their commitments should take in forming nondeceptive and nonthreatening social bonds. The fact of being reasonable provides the vantage point from which they could eventually fulfill the gifts of their humanity and bring about that ultimate political marvel where life in common will unfold as a continuous, unbound exercise in civility.

A Public Fame of Saintliness

The first story of day one, told by Panfilo, is one of the more commented-upon stories of the Decameron.Footnote ⁴⁷ It tells of an archvillain, Ser Cepperello, “a notary by profession,” who is summoned by a merchant, Musciatto Franzesi, and asked to go to France to recover “certain loans that he had made to various people in Burgundy” (D, 25). In France Cepperello falls ill in the house of two brothers, moneylenders by profession, he is confessed by a friar, “expert in the Scriptures and a most venerable man” (D, 28), dies in an odor of sanctity, and is finally buried in the local cathedral. While critics have focused attention on the moralizing intent of the story, I wish to consider how the tale of Cepperello's exploits is being construed; in other words, how the tale itself is meant to expose the nature of a particular belief state (i.e., saintliness, which also happens to be, to some extent, a general feature of values) by reporting its etiology. I propose that we start from the end of the story and see how Boccaccio comes to describe the community's commitment to honor the sanctity of Cepperello (now identified by the Burgundians as ‘Saint Ciappelletto’):

Here we have a description of a belief state that has become part of what Judith Shklar called “the communal consciousness,” in the sense that the whole community of the town in Burgundy where Cepperello is buried knows about his saintliness. Against this public fame of saintliness Boccaccio plays the secret history of how the belief state (i.e., “the veneration in which he was held”) had spread itself among the inhabitants of the town. The secret story, to which the people of the town apparently have no access, is quite different: Cepperello was, in fact, the kind of person who “would have taken it as a slight upon his honour if one of his legal deeds … were discovered to be other than false.” On top of that, he had no scruples “about swearing falsely” and would take particular pleasure “in stirring up enmity, discord and bad blood.” He would bear false witness, kill people with his own hands, use foul language to pour scorn on the sacraments; he would drink, rob, gamble, and overindulge in all sorts of vices and excesses. “He was perhaps the worst man ever born” (D, 26).

Cepperello, lying on his deathbed, happens to overhear a conversation between the two brothers, expressing concern over the possible social consequences of their guest's imminent death. They, on the one hand, cannot turn away from their house “a dying man after giving him hospitality.” On the other hand, they believe that their guest, after leading such a wicked life, would never “be willing to make his confession or receive the sacraments of the Church” (D, 27). Refusal to receive the sacraments or, worse, refusal to give him absolution will create “a commotion” among the people, who would threaten the business and possibly the lives of the two brothers. Cepperello at that point calls the brothers into his bedroom, tells them that he heard their conversation, and sends them off to a friary to call for a most venerable and holy friar to come and hear his confession. It is for the friar that Cepperello, before dying, stages a most extraordinary tale of innocence, purity, and ingenuousness and so, by supposedly damning his soul, saves the lives and goods of the two merchants.

Here what the genealogy of saintliness exposes and demystifies is not only the fraud perpetrated on the community but also the community's own bad faith, intolerance, and bigotry. The tale destroys the fame of saintliness of Ciappelletto, but it also exposes the biases and prejudices that make people consider the profession of the two brothers “iniquitous.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But although the implicit moralizing intent of the story is precisely what has attracted the attention of most scholars, Boccaccio's primary objective here is to stress the difference between moral knowledge and a delusion possessing the aura of moral knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁹ Moral delusions are often supported by existent institutions, and people are disposed to endorse values because of the authority of the institution that issues them. The genealogical aim of some of the stories told by Panfilo—and the novella of Saint Ciappelletto is a case in point—is to question the authority of values which fail to prove to be reasonable. Panfilo's tales repeatedly exhibit the same contrast between common knowledge and the secret history of how a given belief state has come about. In story 2.7, a secret tale challenges the belief that the King of Algarve's wife is a virgin. In story 3.4, common knowledge is reinforced by the deceiving power of bigotry, and is eventually challenged by a private disclosure of the actual etiology of the belief state. In a similar vein, story 4.1 challenges the common presumption that a character called Cymon is a fool.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is important to grasp this dialectic between the secrecy of a piece or exchange of information and the publicity of people's moral knowledge. Secret is the conversation between Cepperello and the two brothers (D, 28); private, and followed by the recommendation that “nobody ever hears what I am about to tell you” (D, 534) is the talk between Lydia and Lusca in story 7.9; private is the conversation in which Dom Felice tells Friar Puccio something that—if it were “to leak out, the clergy … would immediately disintegrate” (D, 217).

Through some of its stories, the Decameron opens up a number of epistemic windows on a world dominated by ignorance and deception and shows how self-delusion, wishful thinking, or a culpable lack of information about the etiology of values and belief states in general are often responsible for a condition of epistemic ignorance that Boccaccio presents as a corruption of both nature and reason.Footnote ⁵¹ The ten storytellers, sheer entertainment aside, exchange crucial information about a world in which reasons to act are often grounded on values and beliefs that exist so long as the age-old divide between appearance and reality is blurred.Footnote ⁵² Here, genuine moral knowledge succumbs to its surrogates, and those who take advantage of this general mystification can reach positions of influence and power.

Panfilo, among the ten storytellers, is the one who most consistently seeks to abide by the test put forth by Pampinea. Throughout the ten days, he builds his case against practices and values deriving from ignorance and superstition; he exposes the false morality of “those prudish ladies who … are more anxious to seem virtuous than to be virtuous” (D, 798) and, more generally, envisages ways to escape the default presumptions of a world in which reason has lost its authority. Panfilo exposes the kind of bad and vicious normativity that comes from values grounded on tradition and the self-contained authority of the clergy, and advocates the good normativity expressed by the unconstrained use of reason.Footnote ⁵³

Naturalizing Humanity

The world Pampinea's test legislates is built on a specific understanding of reason. Here

This brand of naturalism claims that the ethical must be understood as rooted in the natural world, and putative ethical reasons for action need to be grounded in some facts about the natural world. This form of naturalism supports the claim that possessing a human nature can give us sufficient direct ethical guidance without the additional intervention of supernatural prescriptions. What is remarkable about this view is that here the natural element legislates its own normativity.Footnote ⁵⁵

Normativity, which refers to a wide range of phenomena that in an astonishing variety of ways constrain human conduct, is not something external to nature, or supernatural. It rather concerns those forces that have their origins in natural features or dispositions. It is important to stress this naturalistic outcome in the making of Boccaccio's oeuvre, dissolving the distinction, typical of Boccaccio's early works (notably the Filocolo), between delectable love (amore per diletto) and love pursued and practiced within the boundaries of the socially acceptable (amore onesto). It is, though, the theme of delectable love that Boccaccio consistently uses, especially in the Decameron, to challenge the arrangements based on iniquitous power structures. This demystifying function of erotic love is crucial in the Decameron and the storytellers dedicate a whole day and several scattered stories to this specific topic.Footnote ⁵⁶

Boccaccio's views on this issue are encapsulated in two speeches delivered by women victims of arrangements deceptively imposed on them. In 4.1 Fiammetta tells the story of Ghismonda, the daughter of the Prince of Salerno, who falls “madly and secretly in love” with a young man “of exceedingly humble birth, but noble in character and bearing” (D, 292). But the Prince finds out about the affair and kills Ghismonda's lover. After Tancredi's death, Ghismonda decides to address her father and delivers the most remarkable defense of those “forces” that had prompted her to commit a “natural sin” (D, 297). Ghismonda argues that her decision to give herself “to a man of base condition” was dictated by “the nature and power of the laws of youth” (D, 296) and by the careful and thoughtful estimation of Tancredi's “merit and virtues” (D, 298). She then makes a powerful case for the natural equality of all human beings and claims that after the inception of social inequalities “this law has been obscured by a contrary practice, but nature and good manners ensure that its force still remains unimpaired; hence any man whose conduct is virtuous proclaims himself a noble, and those who call him by any other name are in error” (D, 297).

Love's power to expose the deceptive structures of social conventions (such as worth and nobility as criteria for matchmaking) emerges also in the other speech delivered by a woman in the Decameron. Again, in 6.7, a woman proves the vacuity of a law by tracking a moral flaw in the circumstances that brought it about. The opening lines of the story illustrate this most powerful contrast between the validity of the statute and the force of love:

The core argument of Madonna Filippa's self-defense before the podestà of Prato consists in both the assumption of the natural equality of men and women before the laws and the idea that “laws must have the consent of those who are affected by them.” Filippa argues that “when this law was made, no woman gave her consent to it, nor was any woman even so much as consulted. It can therefore justly be described as a very bad law” (D, 463). Here, the attempt to ground validity on consensus is combined with the genealogical scrutiny of an arrangement that is meant to conceal the sheer domination of men over women. Filippa succeeds in proving that the statute of Prato flouts the teleology of nature. Here, her rigorous reasoning—her thoughtful application of Pampinea's test—about the corrupt origins of the statute exposes the bad faith and will to power of a men-dominated society.

There is, however, one important distinction to be drawn here. Boccaccio is aware that the norms legislated by erotic love do not have the power to build a stable set of bonds among people. Erotic love can certainly help dissolve the aura of deception in which some unnatural values prosper, but it cannot support the arrangements sustaining the kind of polity envisioned in the first pages of the book.Footnote ⁵⁷ Erotic love is a powerful antidote against those elements and attitudes supporting bonds and relationships based on deceit and moral fraud, but it seems to fall short of the architectonic task of organizing a durable polity based on some basic principles of individual freedom and accountability. For this reason, delectable love is mostly used to dissolve the misconceptions deriving from complacency, wishful thinking, and other epistemic deficiencies, but it cannot furnish a workable set of normative premises for the universe of mutual civility and respect envisioned by the storytellers.Footnote ⁵⁸

To Boccaccio there is one particular attitude that exemplifies best the natural teleology of reason; an attitude which, unlike erotic love, is not exposed to the drift towards unnatural disorderliness, over and beyond the teleology of nature.Footnote ⁵⁹ This special attitude is friendship, which, just like erotic love, is a power or force that resists the counter forces of “men's shameful and miserly greed” (D, 763). At the same time, friendship, unlike erotic love, can generate those moral habits that lead people to appreciate the actual nature of their disposition to socialize in a nondeceptive manner.

Story 10.8—narrated by Filomena—is a typical tale of control and deception in which Titus confesses to his friend Gisippus that he fell for Sophronia, Gisippus's fiancée. Seeing that his friend has become ill, Gisippus asks him to explain “the cause of his melancholy” (D, 749), and in order to heal Titus's sorrow, Gisippus arranges things so that Sophronia is made to believe that she is marrying him, whereas she is actually marrying Titus. But Sophronia discovers the trick and resolves to tell her father a tale of deception that will be fatal to Gisippus, who leaves Athens, winds up “in abject poverty,” and then confesses a murder he has not committed in order to be put to death. But Titus turns up at the law court, recognizes Gisippus, and declares before the court that he, Titus, committed the murder. Again, Boccaccio weaves a tale of love, friendship, and duty on a web of forces and laws that exceed human control and ingenuity. Titus acknowledges that “the laws of Love are more powerful than any others” (D, 748) and Gisippus, in turn, acknowledges Titus's powerlessness in a situation that exemplifies “the havoc that the powers of Love can inflict” (D, 751). But in a natural scenario in which human agency is reduced to a clash of conflicting forces, Boccaccio shows how control over human vicissitudes can be reestablished through the workings of a second-order force: friendship.

Friendship is the force that prevents other natural forces from playing havoc on human arrangements. Unlike erotic love, the natural teleology of friendship can simultaneously dissolve cultural and religious delusion and stimulate the pursuit of a polity grounded on a higher degree of self-knowledge and mutual respect.

What is distinctive about Boccaccio's strategy of testing the soundness and viability of the values that sustain a good polity is the method whereby the forces that control human behavior are identified and exposed. If reason concerns the ability to trace the teleology of nature, storytelling is the distinctive technique by which a natural fact, or force, or law is traced in human experience. Storytelling is the milieu in which reason tracks the sources of human behavior and tests its correspondence with the teleology of nature. By tracking the teleology of nature—the fact that nature strives to fulfill its own potential, its rationale, and its purpose—reason identifies the direction of fit of natural impulses and instructs people on how to build viable arrangements and laws based on nature and the “consent of those who are affected by them.”

Genealogy and the Politics of Storytelling

In paragraph 163 of his New Deduction of Natural Right (1796–1797), F.W.J. Schelling pointed to one problem in contemporary disputes concerning the nature and scope of modern natural law theories. The problem, according to Schelling, was how “to make the physical power of the individual coincide [identisch zu machen] with the moral power of the right.”Footnote ⁶⁰ It was indeed one of the achievements of (at least one dominant strand in) modern philosophy to have widened the gulf between nature and the (moral) right. Nietzsche, for one, undertook the kind of naturalization of morality that we find, in nuce, in Boccaccio, and that was aimed at possibly reconciling morality with nature.Footnote ⁶¹ But Boccaccio's notion of nature is, unlike Nietzsche's, not merely polemical, that is to say, mainly intended to deconstruct arrangements and ways of thinking that were supposedly designed to resist and ultimately defy nature. It is rather intended to provide humankind with sources of moral direction that need to be genealogically exposed. Boccaccio's nature, in other words, is not blind, and genealogy is thereby meant to reveal its inherent teleology.

A more comprehensive account of Boccaccio's naturalism would probably require a closer scrutiny of its philosophical sources. The aim of this paper is basically to highlight the kind of genealogy that Boccaccio adopts in order to promote a particular kind of naturalism. I believe that Boccaccio can still be read today by philosophers inasmuch as the genealogical mode employed in the Decameron seems a still viable method for addressing some issues in moral and political philosophy: it allows us, in fact, to discriminate beliefs “arrived at the wrong way” and, ultimately, to make them philosophically suspect.Footnote ⁶²

The Decameron presents a number of puzzles about human sociability and shows that reason, if instructed by a true account of how a given arrangement has come about, can in principle determine whether the arrangement is viable (i.e., valuable). The arrangement is sound, according to Boccaccio, if the story of its coming into existence shows no flaws or manipulative interventions. The arrangement, then, reflects the direction of fit of some natural facts about people. Here genealogy is meant to track a possible deviation from the direction of fit and to restore the correct functioning of the teleology of nature. It is important to bear in mind that genealogy is not a separate technique with little bearing on the strand of naturalism supported by Boccaccio. Genealogy functions as a sort of epistemic corrective that Boccaccio employs to detect shortcomings in the teleology of nature. Where social stipulations fall short of nature, and reason is, therefore, kept from guiding human impulses according to their direction of fit, genealogy detects the shortcoming and suggests how to restore the normativity of nature.

Philosophers have either subjected issues of political morality to the requirements of rational justification or historicized the same issues by tracing a flaw or fault or gap in the process of their making. The prevailing analytical approach considers issues of public justification and “public reason” as the grounds of a liberal polity, neglecting other “alternative practices of public reason,” such as some efforts “to understand the history of how a problem becomes our problem.”Footnote ⁶³ Some scholars have objected to the epistemic and normative claims of genealogical explanations, wondering “why … should a history of how we came to be who we are serve as a source of confidence if the values with which we have ended up do not sustain themselves?”Footnote ⁶⁴ Fundamental to Boccaccio's genealogical approach is the assumption that values are, in principle, sensitive to stories about their development and that a given moral orientation is viable when it supports belief states with the right kind of causal history. Here, the underlying assumption is that there is no way to determine “the epistemic status of a belief state” without a comprehensive and studied analysis of the etiology of the state. Louis Menand puts the point strikingly:

Being reminded that the etiology of the belief state did not follow the “correct procedure” may prompt us to search for a clearer understanding of the world in which we exercise commitments to values and attribute entitlements to institutions which legislate and implement values. Hence, a genealogical account of given arrangements and belief states would seek to isolate a causal history and check its alleged correctness.

Boccaccio seems to embrace a form of naturalism supported by a proceduralism according to which rightness in moral matters is grounded on the correct kind of procedures. For Boccaccio the relevant procedures at the source of morality are procedures involved with particular features of people's psychology. What gives such procedures their special status is that they are practically necessary for us—formal procedures rational beings must employ simply to function as agents at all.Footnote ⁶⁶ Everything starts with people's psychology and the teleological structure of human dispositions, but the procedures adopted to either implement or test the validity of a given arrangement need to be designed according to the inherent purpose of those dispositions.

Stories with a genealogical purpose have an impact on our systems of values so long as they target the default presumptions that lie behind some treasured practices. We become oblivious to such presumptions as soon as they turn into “the organizing principle for a wide range of the practices in which we think and act and deal with the world.”Footnote ⁶⁷ By telling stories about how some values were reinforced, we engage in a distinctively “philosophical exercise” whose object is “to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The underlying assumption here is that the ways we silently think about our moral universes are often wrong, and the task of genealogy is then to coach people in exercises in disenchantment that may generate a more thoughtful—though sometimes embittering—comprehension of that universe.

Think of Decameron story 7.9, a tale bearing the unmistakable touch of Panfilo, where Lydia, the wife of Nicostratos, and her lover Pyrrhus make love in front of the husband and convince him that what he thought he saw did not actually happen. But we, the readers, actually know that it did happen. We know the true story of how Nicostratos's belief state came about for we had access to the secret tale of Lydia's infidelity. Panfilo shows Lydia's ability to make her husband believe that his claims were the hallucinatory effect of a pear tree. It is through Panfilo's narrative that we have come to know that Lydia's public tale of fidelity and dedication is the result of a fraud. But, again, what looked like a classical tale of conjugal infidelity turns out, to the revelatory eye of the genealogist, as a story of power and subjugation. In order to find an outlet for erotic love, Lydia is bound to deceive Nicostratos, and Nicostratos, on his part, is the one who benefits from the arrangement that Lydia and Pyrrhus set about to violate. Nicostratos deceives and is, in turn, deceived.

The story exposes the gap between the acknowledged system of morality and the actual teleology of nature. It shows that deception, as to the nature of values, can be so deeply entrenched that it becomes difficult to detect in the world a workable (natural) source of moral direction. For Boccaccio it is the human ability to reckon with the teleology of nature (and to abide by the direction of fit leading to arrangements of civility and mutual respect) that enables people to navigate their way through a world in which human habits and practices are likely to solidify in perennial and ultimately unquestioned patterns of behavior. By concocting a story about the powers of the pear tree to cause hallucinations, Lydia and Pyrrhus expose the dynamics of power in the construction of social bonds and thereby challenge the questionable social uses to which the attendant values can be put.

The moral lesson of the Decameron is that the only viable way out of the edifice of collective delusion about the nature of values is a thorough scrutiny of the causal stories supporting the existing arrangements. It is a lesson that could be fruitfully brought to bear on present issues of political morality, especially on issues that remain hardly approachable through the analytical mode. The lesson, put briefly, is that our moral universe is crammed with pear trees, “skyhooks,”Footnote ⁶⁹ Quinean chimeras, and other devices that make it difficult for us to distinguish between belief states that are worth our commitments and other states that are simply supported by the contingent and residual authority of some politically influential segments of society.

Some scholars (notably, Thomas Nagel) have argued against the epistemic value of genealogical accounts because of their likely failure to provide “a comprehensive account of how historical enquiry solves conceptual puzzles.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Other scholars have challenged this analytical distortion and have tried to describe their project in terms of an “exercise in retrieval.” Charles Taylor, for one, has suggested that in order to get a better understanding of ourselves as beings constituted by practices and “frameworks” that were handed over to us, we need “to fight uphill to rediscover the obvious, to counteract the layers of suppression of modern moral consciousness.”Footnote ⁷¹ Advocates of the philosophical worth of historical or genealogical enquiries have presented their case in terms of a sheer alternative between justifying principles and policies by means of genetic or genealogical accounts “and the non-justification of simply accepting the contingent results of democratic processes.”Footnote ⁷² While genealogy, according to its supporters, helps to challenge the “contingent results of democratic processes,” it remains largely suspect in the analytical quarters, especially among people who believe that democratic values should “sustain themselves.” Values, though, often “sustain themselves” through the self-serving narratives of historical success that people accept without duly checking their course.Footnote ⁷³ And genealogy is precisely aimed at deconstructing success.Footnote ⁷⁴

By reading the Decameron as an exercise in genealogy, we can see that such social artifacts as “merit,” “rank,” and “virtue” are primarily sensitive to storytelling, and values arrived through the correct kind of procedure are usually found to be instrumental to people's needs and aspirations. The politics of storytelling underlying Boccaccio's work is aimed at redressing evaluative biases and dissipating delusions and moral reveries. Sources of morality that are not grounded in nature have to be identified and dispelled, and the ordering agency of reason has to prevail. In a polity in which reason retains its ordering function, the values that float freely without being anchored in the kind of naturalized reason supported by Boccaccio recede from view and eventually cease to hold people in their thrall. The method used to ascertain their viability is the same in both the Genealogie and the Decameron, and the origin of the values, like the inception of the ancient gods, needs to be retrieved in order to ascertain whether the success story that supports them is flawed. Boccaccio understood that the iniquities of the ancient gods had survived under disguise since their seeming departure from the world.Footnote ⁷⁵ And genealogy to Boccaccio is the method of inquiry suitable for uncovering evidence for their lasting plans of domination of humankind.Footnote ⁷⁶ His genealogy of the gods, therefore, should be seen as a template for the genealogy of values undertaken in the Decameron, for both gods and values are transient items in a moral ontology that acknowledges only one set of perennial entities: natural human impulses. The enduring lesson of Boccaccio, then, lies in a particular method for assessing the viability of values. By telling stories he succeeded in detaching those values from sources of normative validity which failed to acknowledge the bounds of what is reasonable.